New Approach for Large-Area Thermoelectric Junctions with a Liquid Eutectic Gallium-Indium Electrode

Abstract

A challenge in organic thermoelectrics is to relate thermoelectric performance of devices to the chemical and electronic structures of organic components inside them on a molecular scale. To this end, a reliable and reproducible platform relevant to molecular level thermoelectric measurements is essentially needed. This paper shows a new, efficient approach for thermoelectric characterization of a large area of molecular monolayers using liquid eutectic gallium-indium (EGaIn). A cone-shaped EGaIn microelectrode permits access to noninvasive, reversible top-contact formation onto organic surfaces in ambient conditions, high yields of working devices (up to 97%), and thus statistically sufficient thermoelectric data sets (similar to 6000 data per sample in a few hours). We here estimated thermopowers of EGaIn (3.4 +/- 0.1 mu V/K) and the Ga2O3 layer (3.4 +/- 0.2 mu V/K) on the EGaIn conical tip and successfully validated our platform with widely studied molecules, oligophenylenethiolates. Our approach will open the door to thermoelectric large-area molecular junctions.